The 2012 Defense Budget Is The Highest Since World War II

Defense spending is at historic highs. And though it's the same size, the same shape, and has the same abilities, the U.S. military costs 35 percent more than it did a decade ago.

A 75 page report released last week, by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments also points out that the DoD spent $46 billion of that total on projects that failed, due to cost overruns or technical glitches.

Because of these failures the military was not modernized as planned and will be forced to achieve that goal in the face of extreme budget cuts. In a statement to Reuters the report's author Todd Harrison said:

"This was the opportunity of the decade, to really recapitalize and modernize the military's equipment and that has been squandered. [Now] we're looking at the prospect of a declining defense budget over the next decade and we're not going to have the opportunity to do that again."

The FY 2012 budget requests a total of $676 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD). The base budget for DoD includes $553 billion in discretionary funding and $5 billion in mandatory funding, and an additional $118 billion is requested for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The budget request also includes $19 billion for defense-related atomic energy programs and $8 billion for defense-related activities in other agencies, bringing the total national defense budget to $703 billion.

Adjusting for inflation, the level of funding proposed for the base defense budget in the FY 2012 request is the highest level since World War II, surpassing the Cold War peak of $531 billion (in FY 2012 dollars) reached in FY 1985.

The report also notes that while this is high by historic standards, it's still a consistent percent of overall federal spending.